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Making Sense of Neoconservatism

John Judis warns against using political labels too rigidly: I am not sure what this says about what the United States should do in the world, but it does say that commentators about foreign policy should be careful about ascribing essences to political tendencies that are linked, to borrow Ludwig Wittgenstein’s phrase, more by “family-resemblances” […]

John Judis warns against using political labels too rigidly:

I am not sure what this says about what the United States should do in the world, but it does say that commentators about foreign policy should be careful about ascribing essences to political tendencies that are linked, to borrow Ludwig Wittgenstein’s phrase, more by “family-resemblances” than by certain unyielding core characteristics. Beinart himself has advocated discarding the term “neo-conservative” altogether. I wouldn’t go that far. But I would be careful about using a rigid definition of neo-conservatism to advance or detract from a political position about big government or about Egypt’s military. There are times in American politics—one thinks of the debate over the Balkans in the mid-’90s and over Egypt today—where the issues seem to defy the usual divisions between liberals and conservatives, left and right, and hawk and dove.

Judis is right to be cautious about how political labels are used, but the examples he uses here should remind us that careful attention to the tensions and divisions on both left and right will help us better explain why different factions take the positions that they do. The goal shouldn’t be to reduce one faction’s views to just one preoccupation as the thing that “explains” the entire worldview, but to recognize how and why their priorities change in response to different events. For example, neoconservatism can’t be defined solely by its hard-line support for Israel, and neither can it be reduced only to an ideology of democracy promotion or aggressive support for U.S. hegemony. What makes contemporary neoconservatism distinctive is that its adherents try to balance all of these contradictory commitments without giving up on any one of them. So there are neoconservatives critical of the coup in Egypt because they are ideological democratists, and there are others that only care about promoting democracy when it leads the right “pro-American” result, but all of them would insist that the U.S. ought to be actively promoting democracy around the world. Neoconservative coup defenders haven’t given up on U.S.-led democracy promotion all together, but it’s clear that they view democracy promotion in instrumental terms rather than as an end in itself.

Thus you have the WSJ editors praising the coup in Egypt despite their past obsession with the so-called “freedom agenda,” because their support for the “freedom agenda” was also based on the assumption that it was expanding U.S. influence at the expense of Russia and Iran. That assumption was wrong, but it accounts for why they cared about political upheavals in Ukraine, Georgia, and elsewhere. The most common neoconservative response to last year’s free and fair election in Georgia was to angrily dismiss the winning coalition’s leader as a Russian stooge, because in Georgia what mattered more to them was boosting a particular “pro-American” government and leader rather than supporting democratic norms, and that in turn required that neoconservatives echo a lot of that government’s propaganda about its domestic opponents. Because neoconservatives typically believe that American “values” and interests advance together, and because they are often quite bad in acknowledging the trade-offs that are sometimes required, they don’t see the contradictions between their different commitments, and don’t accept that they’re really choosing one over another.

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